In the vast forests, stretching to the Salto de Guayrá, a few scattered tribes, known as Caaguas, roamed through the thickets, or encamped upon the streams. In the thirty towns, once full of life and stir, in every one of which there was a church, finer, as an old Spanish writer says, than any in Buenos Ayres, there was naught but desolation and despair. The Indians either had returned into the woods, been killed in the ceaseless revolutionary wars, or had been absorbed into the Gaucho populations of Corrientes, Rio Grande, Entre Rios, and of Santa Fé. It may be that all Indian races are destined to disappear if they come into contact with Europeans; certainly, experience would seem to confirm the supposition. The policy of the Jesuits, however, was based on isolation of their missions, and how this might have worked is matter at least for speculation. It was on account of the isolation which they practised that it was possible for the extravagant calumnies which were circulated as to their rule and riches to gain belief. It was on account of isolation that the first conflicts arose betwixt them and the authorities, both clerical and lay. That the Jesuits were more highly esteemed than the other religious orders in Spanish America in the seventeenth century, the saying current in those days, ‘Los demas van á uña, los Jesuitas á una’—_i.e._, The others get all they can, but the Jesuits have one aim (the conversion of the Indians)—seems to show. It is not my purpose to deal with the probable reasons which induced their expulsion in Europe. Suffice it to say that, whatever crimes or misdemeanours they were guilty of, they were never called on to answer before any tribunals, and that in many instances they were treated, especially in Portugal, with great cruelty and injustice. The burning, at the age of eighty, of the unfortunate Malagrida in Lisbon under the auspices of Pombal, for a book which it seems improbable he could have written in prison at so great an age, and which, moreover, was never brought into court, only supposed extracts from it being read, may serve as an example. In order clearly to understand the position of the Jesuits in America, and especially in Paraguay and Bolivia, it is necessary to glance briefly at the history of the first conquest of the river Plate. The discovery of America opened up to Europe, and especially to Spain, opportunities for expansion of national territory and individual advancement which no epoch, either before or since, has equalled. From a cluster of small States, struggling for existence against a powerful enemy on their own soil, in a few years Spain became the greatest empire of the world. The result was that a spirit of adventure and a desire to grow rich speedily possessed all classes. In addition to this, every Spaniard in America during the first few years of the conquest seemed to consider himself, to some extent, not only as a conqueror, but also as a missionary.